A blog about weather, climate, and science. Occasionally, we'll post on other topics of interest.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

We Have a 'Winner'! Sandy Blamed on Global Warming

Yesterday, I asked this question:

Turns out I wasn't even close. It has already been blamed. From the Huffington Post:

Politico asked on Wednesday if perhaps Hurricane Sandy would be "the next climate wake-up call" as climate change will cause storms to become increasingly intense. As for this storm, the potential timing with Election Day led ClimateSilence.org's Brad Johnson to remark, “Sandy is yet another reminder that the candidates should stop competing over who can poison the weather faster with increased oil, gas and coal production."

3 comments:

Hurricane larger and stronger than any which have ever occurred before? Well, the prediction was that global warming would cause that.

It's good that people are blaming Hurricane Sandy on global warming. Because it *IS* due to global warming. Technically, only the incremental difference in strength over a "regular" big hurricane is due to global warming, of course.

Time to admit it. People are blaming global warming for our more frequent and stronger hurricanes... because global warming is the cause of our more frequent and stronger hurricanes.

I don't know how one could go about determining whether or not any given storm is due to 'global warming'. But there are a few things I'm pretty darn sure of.One: Given the absorption spectrum of carbon dioxide, visible-wavelength photons pass through the atmosphere more-or-less unaffected by the atmosphere's CO2.Two: The energy carried by those visible-wavelength photons gets transferred to the ground, rocks, and whatever else they hit.Three: That transferred energy makes all those things heat up.Four: When things get hotter, they radiate energy, mostly in the IR portion of the spectrum.Five: Given the absorption spectrum of CO2, the energy carried by those IR-wavelength photons tends to get absorbed by atmospheric CO2.Six: As a result of the above, the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more heat energy is trapped in the atmosphere.Seven: Ultimately, the global weather system is a heat engine, driven by the difference in temperature between the Earth's "day side" and "night side".Eight: The more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the greater the difference in temperature between Earth's "day side" and "night side".Nine: Since Earth's weather system is a heat engine, greater difference in temperature between Earth's "day side" and "night side" means greater extremes of weather—stronger and more-extreme storms in greater quantity, etc etc etc.None of the above can tell us whether any one storm in specific is due to 'global warming', of course; if the Earth's weather system is a heat engine, it's a ferociously hypercomplexificationated one whose behavior is, at best, only partially understood. But if anybody wants to make the argument that it's just not possible for 'global warming' to result in storms like H. Sandy, well, they've got their work cut out for them. Something like, oh, demonstrating that we've got the absorption spectrum of hydrogen all wrong, that would do the trick…